It does not “survive” the first shot, but instead falls to the ground. The pilot has to replace a rotor and a cable to get it back up. Cool, but oversold.

damien

There’s nothing special about Kydex – its a relatively brittle plastic with a relatively low strength to weight ratio. Kydex is a blend of PVC and acrylic, which means its sort of soft and sort of brittle at the same time. Its useful because it can be easily thermoformed or vacuum formed, i.e. easy to make custom semi-rigid holsters from it by heating it up and draping it over a firearm or knife.

The drone is billed as the “world’s most indestructible drone”, but it looks to me like the “world’s heaviest drone” considering the amount of material used to make the shell.

If I wanted to make a super tough drone, I would probably lean toward using a polycarbonate, polypropylene or PET shell instead of kydex. Then again, I would question the whole “make a shell” approach as requiring a lot of material for a given level of durability.

The main thing is that the electronics need to be protected, and the ‘arms’ on which the rotors are mounted need to be able to take a beating. Carbon fibre tubes combined with a small protected capsule in the centre would do the job nicely. Can fill the tubes with syntactic foam to give them extra strength. Could even mount the motors in protected capsules at the end of the tubes if the motors seemed too fragile on their own (they have metal enclosures).

Blake

Yep, I’d think properly-polycoated carbon fiber would be the way to go, or possibly kevlar.

JT

I don’t get it. Are they trying to sell this to paranoid government procurement officers to protect them from paranoid citizens who are afraid of paranoid government officials who…

Mystick

It looks kind of cool…

Chris

So it survives the first shot and falls to the ground…So you just walk over and shoot it again? There wasn’t much that was indestructible about it.

Slim934

Birdshot eh?

Time to pull out the 00 buck!

J.T.

Use a shotgun that has a stock so you can aim, a longer barrel with a full choke, and 3″ steel BB shot instead of cheap #7 birdshot from walmart and get back to me on how well it holds up.

gunslinger

quad copter “trap” shooting? wonder if you can “preprogram” flight patterns for shotgunners.

that’s be cool

Dave

Must be a professional?!? LOL

John

Of course I am allowed to shoot your drone! I am a professional drone hunter damn it!
It has nothing to do with the fact that you were flying it on my property.

Tenacious221

Ohhh that doesn’t look THAT bad LOL.

Maybe if it were florescent lime green. That’d be better.

MrSatyre

“PSA: Don’t put striped warning tape on a pistol-gripped shotgun. It does not look cool.”

He obviously thinks it does, so who cares? Besides you, I mean.

Gol

I can’t figure out why so many people want to build drones. Do they want a future with more surveillance? Same question to those working on facial recognition software, do they want to be tracked everywhere?

PatrickHenry1789

That’s just great, a practically indestructible surveillance machine. I feel SO much safer now. /

Zius Patagus

Looks cool, flies pretty well. Good for spying on your neighbors. Made of Kydex, who doesn’t like Kydex? Yeah, I’m just getting around to reading three day old posts.